Case Studies

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THE CLIENT

Sandals is the leading operator of all-inclusive resorts for couples looking for luxurious getaways. Sandals has properties throughout the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, The Bahamas, Saint Lucia, Antigua, Barbados, and Grenada.

Sandals has been operating in the ﬁeld of travel and leisure since 1981. Their focus in digital marketing is to increase awareness, complement TV advertising, and grow bookings.

“ESV has been a fantastic partner over the years. When we wanted to get more aggressive in our efforts, ESV stepped in with a solid strategy to boost spend while maintaining efficiency. We were expecting to grow our orders, but we had no idea we would actually end up being able to spend more than ever before, while still maintaining our KPI targets! Thanks to these results, we’re expanding into performance display with ESV at the helm, and I have full confidence that performance will continue to exceed expectations.”

Chris Mullins
Search & PPC Marketing Manager – Sandals

THE CHALLENGE

The Caribbean luxury travel operator had over 5 years of history with ESV when they began to look for ways to improve efficiency without impacting revenue volume.
Sandals wanted to optimise their search activity so that other marketing channels – such as RTB – could be implemented while maintaining the overall online marketing budget and CoS target.
Sandals also wanted to maximise impression share for exact match keywords. Broad match keywords appeared to have been cannibalising traffic in other areas of the account and were negatively affecting phrase match efficiency as well.

THE SOLUTION

We began by changing all US broad match keywords to Broad Match Modified. This involved placing “+” signs in front of key terms within each keyword. Words like “of”, “and”, “to” and “in” did not have “+” added to them, but all meaningful terms in a phrase were amended. We did this in the most mature parts of the account in the US market only.

Using the Broad Match Modifier opted us out of the full broad match behaviour (i.e. matching similes, and matching against in-session searches that were unrelated to the site).
In addition, we added a host of search queries in exact match that had been triggering broad match and converting.